Eleanor Of Aquitaine (17 page)

The arrangements for assuaging the rancors between Capets and Plantagenets, to which anxious march vassals looked for peace, suffered an unexpected check in the late summer of 1159. The Countess of Poitou had never ceased to claim inheritance to the splendid Mediterranean province of Toulouse. It had belonged to her grandmother the Countess Philippa, the wife of the troubadour Count of Poitou. The troubadour appears to have mortgaged Philippa's patrimony for means to go upon his famous but ill-starred crusade, and finding himself in financial ruin on his return, he had probably done little to redeem it; and his subsequent abandonment of Philippa for the Countess of Chatellerault had further attenuated his claims. The county had passed to other heirs and it lay, unfortunately for Henry, in the vassalage of the Capets. But Eleanor never ceased to regard as part of her rightful inheritance the great red city with its castle of the Narbonnais, where Philippa had reigned as countess, and where her own father Guillaume le Toulousain and her uncle Raymond of Antioch had been born. The demand was now revived by a quarrel between the reigning Count of Toulouse and the Count of Barcelona, in which the succession of Philippa's inheritance ran in danger of slipping away from the Counts of Toulouse without slipping into the hands of the Plantagenets.

The moment at which the problem presented itself was not an auspicious time for Henry to sully his immaculate relations with his overlord, but this crisis of the queen's, involving the rich domain lying on the borders of Aquitaine, could not be subdued to his convenience. He had no choice but to strike while the iron was hot. Becket, who threw himself with zeal into the project of the Plantagenets, equipped and brought a force to the support of Barcelona, which gave Henry's expedition the appearance not precisely of a thrust at his overlord, but as one of Barcelona against the house of Toulouse.

But when Barcelona and his allies, the King of the English and his chancellor, drew up their troops and their engines before the high red walls of Toulouse, they learned that Louis was within, and that, with just such reckless gallantry as he had displayed at the siege of Damascus, he had thrown himself into the defense. There was a limit, it seemed, to his "dovelike simplicity." It was one thing for him to concede the Vexm and its castles as a domain to enhance the portion of his future son-in-law; quite another to yield up Toulouse to the Countess of Poitou. Henry hesitated before the dilemma that confronted him as Eleanor's husband and Louis's vassal. To the chagrin of his following, and especially of his chancellor, he folded his tents and withdrew. He had been uneasily aware of a legal flaw in the proceeding from the start. He would not, he declared, set the bad example of an attack upon the person of his overlord.

The affair dragged out through the autumn in inconclusive forays and reprisals on other fronts until winter ended operations in the field. The Plantagenets lingered through the vintage in Poitou and held their Christmas court in Falaise in Normandy. Shortly after Advent Eleanor returned to her delegated sovereignty in Britain and to the supervision of her court and household. The Pipe Rolls show her acting responsibly in matters of government, making progresses of her own from one royal seat to another, and drawing handsomely upon the revenues for the expenses of herself and her growing family.
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But Henry remained for the fourth year abroad near the heart of his domain, where rumor of all the stirrings in Europe came swiftly to his ear.

In the fall of 1160 someone brought to him a disturbing bit of news from the Ile. As soon as it reached his ears, Henry summoned the queen from a six months' sojourn in Britain to join him forthwith in Rouen, and ordered her to bring with her the heir of England and the little Princess Matilda.
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The Pipe Rolls show that Eleanor at once put out in the royal smack at a cost of seven pounds, and succeeded in arriving in Normandy in plenty of time. In October of this year one of the inscrutable visitations on the just overtook Louis in Paris. On the fourth of the month his Queen Constance gave birth to a second daughter, and then, having brought this calamity on the Capets, closed her eyes and "passed from the world." In this double disaster Louis cast about almost wildly for solace and redress. He was now forty, for the second time without a queen, the father of four daughters, and not a single son He considered with his barons whether he should now cast his lot with those vassals of the house of Champagne whose influence the Capets had dreaded for two generations as rivaling their own. A daughter of Champagne long ago, before the Poitevin alliance, had been denied Louis's brother Philip on grounds of consanguinity. But perhaps the Capets had suffered enough for consanguinity.
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Without waiting to lay aside his weeds, he offered the queen's coronet to a daughter of that house. In less than a month from the death of Constance, Louis married, as his third queen, Adele of Champagne, who was a sister of his future sons-in-law, the Counts of Champagne and of Blois.

In the meantime the Plantagenets had been well prepared for most of the contingencies in Paris. Before the birth of the unfortunate Frankish princess, Henry had at once taken the precaution to present his own namesake heir to Louis on the marches of the French domain and witnessed the lad's homage to his overlord for Normandy. The Angevin's own struggle for the crown had made him a believer in the frequent renewal of pledges, and he wished now to make sure that Louis had no intention of qualifying the investiture of the little duke, in case heaven should vouchsafe the Capets an heir of their own. The subsequent birth of a second princess had rendered this precaution less significant, as it had also rendered superfluous the fetching over of the little Princess Matilda for betrothal to a possible male Capet. But prescient as the Plantagenets were, they had not gone so far as to imagine the death of Queen Constance. This incalculable event, followed by Louis's sudden remarriage with the house of Champagne and Blois — those hereditary enemies of the Angevins — roused them to fresh anxieties, and they took their own impromptu measures to safeguard their interests. While Louis was preoccupied with his hurried nuptials, and without giving notice to any of the Franks, the Plantagenets took it upon themselves to celebrate with an unseemly haste the marriage of their five year old heir to the three-year old Princess Marguerite of France in Newburgh in Normandy.
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They did not distract Louis, preengaged as he was at the moment, with their intentions, nor summon the Capets to the affair, but they were careful to have everything done in strict accordance with the canons as Louis would have wished. Fortunately, they had the offices of two legates of the Holy See who were at hand and eager to gratify Henry in order to procure his recognition of their papal candidate.
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Upon the conclusion of the marriage, Henry, without waiting for Louis's assent nor any other formalities, took over from the Templars the castles of the Vexm, which had been left in their keeping as the bride's dower against the day of her marriage; and he also took into his custody his infant daughter-in- law as hostage for Louis's faithful adherence to all the articles of agreement between them.

These proceedings over the borders of Normandy, coming as a climax to other calamities, appear to have stunned Louis. In reprisal he scourged the perfidious Templars out of Paris.
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The house of Champagne interpreted Henry's enterprise as an unmitigated feudal affront and determined to redress it by recourse to arms. But the foresight of the Plantagenets rendered their demonstrations innocuous. At their first feint Henry seized Thibault of Blois's castle of Chaumont, which he had long coveted anyway to round out an angle of his territory on the Loire. Then, as the season of winter put a term to war, the King and Queen of the English withdrew well within their own frontiers with the heir of England and the Princess of France and a goodly company of nobles to keep the time of Advent in the seat of the Angevin counts in Le Mans.

For the Plantagenets the decade from 1155 to 1165 had been lively and prosperous. They had founded a dynasty, established an empire, fortified its frontiers with strong castles, made it proof against arms, filled it with treasure, enlivened it with learning and the arts. Abruptly, invincibly, they had altered the map, the balance of power, the destiny of peoples.

Princes receive their glaive from the Church, to which it properly belongs. To the prince the Church gives authority over the bodies of men, but reserves to herself the cure of souls. Hence the prince is minister to the priest, from whom he derives his less worthy part.

John of Salisbury,
Polycraticus
, IV,

IN 1161 HENRY'S ATTENTION HAD BEEN DRAWN from the labor of solidifying his empire on the Continent by events in England. Early in the spring a long decline brought Thibault of Canterbury "to the end of his life days." In most of the annals this important event is recorded merely by the chronicler's stock line,
In hoc anno obiit Theobaldus
. He died an anxious and unrequited soul.
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Neither Thomas nor Henry came at his summons to console his last days. It was he who, by his policies of forbearance and conciliation, had brought about the peaceful transition to the new regime. He had faithfully supported Matilda Empress and her heir and produced the compromise resulting in Henry's succession; and in all the period following he had so dealt with the difficult issues between the church and the king as to keep the peace and soothe the rancors of the civil war. He had given Henry his devoted chancellor and put his household of disciplined clerks at the services of the new order. Thibault had hoped that Becket would incline a grateful king to protection of the church; but Henry seemed, on the contrary, to have indentured Becket to the world. It was Thomas himself, the son of Canterbury, who had laid upon the bishoprics the arbitrary tax for the queen's campaign against Toulouse. In his last days Thibault turned his face to the wall. His household had been the school for episcopal careers; yet churchmen found among his suffragans no obvious successor to his see.

But even if the church had had a conspicuous candidate upon whom all factions could unite, Henry had no idea of leaving initiative in selection of a primate to the church alone. Issues which could not much longer be postponed had for years been accumulating between the See of Canterbury and the king. Both had grievances. Canterbury could well complain that Henry held vacant important bishoprics while their revenues poured into his secular enterprise, that church properties alienated in the days of Stephen were not yet restored. Henry, on the other hand, was resolved to end the situation by which a large portion of his subjects were able to find in the ecclesiastical courts means of avoiding the civil justice of the king. He resolved that these courts, with their special protection of clerks and their appeals to Rome, should offer no immunities from the universal operation of his law. The Angevin, who above all things liked to count and consolidate his gains in conflict, foresaw a long train of inconclusive aggressions and reprisals between church and state in which his arm, however powerful, could not effectively come at the ghostly armor of his antagonist. In the critical state of affairs, it was of the essence of statesmanship to secure as successor to Thibault a prelate with a not too ecclesiastical view of things.

During the archbishop's months of failing health, Henry turned over his problem in his mind, to light upon the fit man for the primacy, to make him acceptable to the electors of Canterbury, and his thoughts turned irresistibly to the chancellor, Thomas, who was of the archbishop's household, yet had shown himself more zealous than the king in all the royal interest; Thomas, whose training in the law schools of Bologna and Auxerre had made him so conveniently apt in argument, so skillful to foreclose; Thomas, whom custom had made familiar with the royal purpose and intent If the church had given the king his chancellor, the king would now give the church its primate.
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If the Archbishop of Canterbury and the king's confidential servant were one and the same man, and that man Becket, then Becket, the king's chancellor, would speak privily to Becket, the archbishop, and persuade him to be reasonable with the king. The idea of uniting in Thomas the complementary functions of primate and chancellor seemed to Matilda Empress, who had seen such operations in Germany, impolitic and she opposed it. But Henry, feeling the sap of prescience running in him, took bolder counsel.

At the very core of Henry's imperial thoughts was the matter of establishing beyond any possible breach of faith the succession of his heirs to the empire he was building. The years of struggle for his own crown made him keenly aware of the dangers besetting the royal pretensions of a child. A stickler for oaths and their frequent renewal, Henry sought occasions to invoke these feudal sanctions in favor of his dynasty He had presented his first two sons with the queen to his barons at Wallingford in the year after his coronation and secured recognition of the two infants in succession as his heirs.
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The king and queen had worn their crowns in London and Winchester and at the Christmas and Easter courts of their chief provincial seats, and Henry had been careful to give authority to the feudal oath by tendering his own homage and witnessing that of his eldest son to the King of France. He now foresaw that there might be some demur among the bishops of England at accepting as their primate a worldly clerk who had not even taken priest's orders, and he wanted to make sure that the interim between Thibault's death and the elevation of his successor should give no occasion for a lapse of allegiance to the little Prince Henry.

Accordingly, in the spring of 1162, he summoned the chancellor to the castle of Falaise, where he and the queen had held their Easter court. He charged Thomas to take the lad at once to Britain, convene the barons and the bishops in Winchester, and require a renewal of their recognition of the prince as heir of England. The child was glad to go with his dear master Thomas,
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who was authorized to procure a little golden crown and sumptuous regalia for the presentation. The farewells were done and Becket and his ward were about to set forth with their cortege for Barfleur when Henry, as if moved by some sudden impulse, drew Becket aside and broke to him his resolution touching the primacy. But the chancellor was not taken unawares the idea was already in his mind, and Henry was dashed that Thomas betrayed no elation at this, his second elevation to power and dignity. Jocosely, as the king's intimate, Becket twitched his own brocaded sleeve and asked how such trappings befitted the shepherd of Canterbury.
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Then looking down with gravity upon his lord the king, he spoke courteously and with emotion. Their friendship, he said, so happy and unconstrained, their common enterprise, could not survive the change. There were other men he would rather see in the primacy. The king found himself obliged to argue away Thomas' reluctance. In that hour the two men scanned each other with a deep surmise, each seeking to divine a sudden strangeness in the other's thought. Then, as time sped for departure, they clasped hands and separated with the kiss of peace. Over the Channel, by the same wind that drove Becket and the prince to Southampton, went messengers, both bishops and barons, to Canterbury summoning the monks to present Archdeacon Thomas to the suffragans of the see for election to the primacy.

While these brethren murmured together in their chapter house over the peremptory mandate of the king, Becket betrayed no concern with their affairs. He busied himself with the king's orders to convene the barons and the bishops in Winchester at Whitsuntide, procured the crownlet, and himself, with a most unusual courtesy and grace, gave example to that august convocation by first offering his own homage to the little prince, his ward. Neither Henry nor Eleanor was present at the scene to diminish the splendors of their heir. The child Henry, who then presided in the hall of Winchester with the golden circlet on his brow and saw his master Becket on his knee before him, and then received the oaths of fealty of the lords temporal and spiritual of the realm, was seven years of age. The chroniclers do not say whether the Princess of France shared in the pledges made to her wedded lord.

A month later Thomas was ordained priest, and three days later still (June 3, 1162) he was consecrated and enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury by Henry, Bishop of Winchester. Not without some protest among his peers did Thomas the Chancellor, "who nourished himself with meat and wine," mount to the highest churchly dignity, the highest place in Britain save only the status of the king.

It was only in January 1163 that Henry and Eleanor, having been long delayed by winter storms, crossed from Normandy to England. A cortege of nobles and prelates went down to Southampton to meet the royal smack, to welcome with cries of "vivat rex" the king who had been four years absent from the island. On the levee Thomas and the little heir of England waited hand in hand for the push of the tide, the lowering of the sail.
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It was from the archbishop's sheltering cloak the prince leapt forward to embrace the king and queen whom he had quitted in Falaise nine months before. One chronicler observes that when Thomas, clad now more with dignity than splendor, advanced to meet the king, Henry's manner was "blithe"; another that Henry cast a dark look upon his old friend and gave him but a perfunctory salute. Whatever the greeting may have been, they rode together up to London.

It was true that furious barons had already sought the king in Normandy with their grievances against Canterbury. Without ceremony, the archbishop had dispossessed them of properties alienated from the see in Stephen's reign, properties to which long tenure seemed to convey to them a right.
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In the episcopal courts clerks were finding immunity from the penalties meted to laics for similar crimes in secular courts, those shire tribunals that Henry, with the aid of his admirable chancellor, had been at such labor to establish at the outset of his rule as the indispensable foundation of order in his realm.

In the six months since his elevation, Becket had become a sedulous archbishop. He had put off grandeur and put on simplicity. He had subdued his days to the austere regimen of the priest. His sermons, his vigils, the abundance of his penitential tears, marked him as one changed by a miracle of grace.
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He had, to Henry's deep chagrin, resigned the chancellorship and been formally discharged from all secular liabilities.
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More than all, he had begun to employ in the service of his see those talents once so useful to the king.

All these sudden changes in Thomas accused Henry of some grave error of judgment in the character of the man who had for eight years of his reign been most intimately associated with him in privy matters of state.
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Henry was cynical about miracles of grace. He who had seen Thomas in ribald company with soldiers on the road, and known him as the promoter of devious royal schemes, had shared his gaiety, his eloquence, his lavishness, his wit, saw in the austere figure now clothed in the black
cappa
of the Augustinian canons a plain hypocrite, a betrayer of the very hand that had raised him up. He was galled too by the fact that, although Becket had withdrawn to the privacy of a new role, the secrets of his own mind and polity were as familiar to his once-friend Thomas as an old mass book. He reflected that he had himself raised this ingrate from clerk to chancellor, from chancellor to archbishop; and he resolved that he would bring him down by the same stairs by which he had gone up. If, in his agitation, Henry remembered Rome, he was perhaps not very much alarmed by the specter of Pope Alexander, who had lately besought Angevin support to gain the throne of Saint Peter, and who had only just ventured back to his temporalities from his long exile in Provence.

With the intention of bringing the issues raised by Thomas before his liege men, Henry convened an assembly of bishops and barons at Westminster in October 1163.
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In the first six months after his return to Britain, the king had found occasions for breaches with the archbishop, and angry words had flown between them. It was in London that his wrath broke in torrents on his old favorite. The interval had given time for both Henry and Thomas to measure the ground that lay between them, and for the bishops and barons to take counsel with each other as to where their interest and safety lay in the schism that now plainly threatened.

At Westminster Henry complained before the bishops of the lenience and venality of the ecclesiastical courts, and of the character of the judges. He declared that evil men pushed themselves into ordination only to turn the "dignity and liberty" of the church into contempt. He demanded to know why he, as his ancestors had never done, should wear a tottering crown, why he should forego those prerogatives belonging to his forebears of maintaining an even justice in his lands. He demanded the obedience owed to the crown, and especially the delivery of guilty clerks into his courts, and he required from Thomas' suffragans a "clear answer" on the articles of his complaint. The issue raised thus suddenly was too formidable for settlement on the hour. Thomas replied cautiously for his fearful bishops that the lords spiritual desired to obey the king's will in all things save only if it should show itself menacingly against the will of God and the laws and dignities of the church. Henry could not make of this the "clear answer" he required. The assembly broke up in confusion and dismay. The king strode out of the hall without inviting the customary blessing of the bishops.

The next day Henry summoned Becket to a personal humiliation. He called upon him to surrender the chief sources of his wealth, the rich manors of Berkhampstead and Eye;
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and as a special biting mark of his disfavor, he recalled Prince Henry and the Princess of France from Becket's house, where for most of the time since their marriage these children had grown together as playmates in the dear custody and tutelage of Canterbury. To make these insults signal and notorious, Henry summoned his own Christmas court, his queen and children, to keep the season of Advent in the castle of Berkhampstead.